While the NYTimes continues its campaign to convince its readers that the German intelligence agents stationed in Iraq during the Iraq War were “helping” the US, a spokesperson for their employer, Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service (BND), has a radically different explanation for its apparent cooperation with US forces. A key element in the Times’s – for Americans at any rate – comforting scenario is the presence of a BND liaison officer at the headquarters of US Central Command in Doha. The following from the Friday edition of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung:

The BND confirmed the deployment of a liaison officer to the Doha-based central command of US armed forces in the Middle East. The BND insists, however, that it provided no information relevant to the war effort to the United States. A spokesperson for the BND said on Thursday that the deployment of the agent to the office of Commander Tommy Franks had no special significance. “He was in fact there, in order to get information, not in order to give any.” The spokesperson did not exclude, however, that information from the two BND agents in Iraq could have reached the United States via the liaison…. [My emphasis – JR]